Yeah, hookahs aren't meant for smoking weed, and it's wasteful and pointless to use a hookah for that. In fact, you can't really use a hookah for anything that doesn't have molasses mixed in with it. Traditionally they were sometimes used to smoke hash or opium, but it was always mixed in with a larger volume of shisha, never smoked on it's own.
As far as alternatives to coals, I've come up with a couple but surprisingly I've never heard of my methods being used elsewhere. You can use an electric barbecue lighter. One like this: BUY Electric Charcoal Barbecue Starter That particular model is probably a bit to large for the average hookah bowl, but I just wanted you to be able to see what they look like. They are essentially the same thing as the heat elements on an electric stove-top. For hookah use, what I've done is bend it (carefully) to sit over the top of the hookah bowl with the handle going down at a 90 degree angle, and then I duct-tape the handle to the stem of the hookah. You might want to carefully bend the heat element so that it's more condensed with the element spread out over a smaller surface area so that the entire element is directly over the tobacco, if you understand what I mean. Then you make sure that it isn't touching any tobacco, and then wrap tin foil over the top of it all so that the element and the bowl are covered by the foil in order to insulate the heat (unlike the standard method where you would put a coal on top of the tin foil).
You can also use a heat gun (Heat gun - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) but this takes more work as you have to hold the heat gun and pull the trigger while you take a hit from the hookah hose.
Both of these methods also make it a lot easier to avoid burning the tobacco, because with a hookah you want to mostly vaporize the tobacco and end up with a bowl of dried out and darkened tobacco, not charred tobacco.
Last edited:
. 
